According to a July 26 report in Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) allocated ¥2 billion in its fiscal 2013 budget for classifying Chinese patent documents under Japan’s File Index (FI) system.
The rapid growth in Chinese patent documents has increased the search burden for Japanese companies assessing the patentability of new technologies before filing in Japan or abroad, and for examiners at the Japan Patent Office (JPO). METI intends the classification project to improve efficiency. It plans to define detailed technical fields during 2012 and classify approximately 40,000–50,000 documents per year.
The JPO began translating abstracts of Chinese utility model documents into Japanese in 2011 and Chinese invention patent documents in 2012. It is considering combining this translation work with FI classification.
Priority technical fields would include automobiles, motors, machinery and mechanical equipment, in which Japanese companies have particular strengths.